They get a 9 for pomp and spectacle, but only a 3 for furthering world understanding and a 2 for the fan experience.
Reuters / Kai Pfaffenbach
A security guard stands near the National Stadium during the closing ceremony of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, August 24, 2008. The stadium is also known as the Bird’s Nest.
This is where 12 days of Olympic fandom has taken me. I am plopped on a sofa, shoes being removed by two smiling hostesses in strapless gowns, in the chandeliered lobby of a giant massage parlor advertising something called “Mashed Medical Treatment,” done up as a marble-laden Roman bath for VIPs, where I’ve been handed the following menu of services: “Shu Shi Jie Amorous Feelings” (the most costly, including manipulations a helpful host acts out in explicit manner), “Studtching Body for Important Guest” (but hopefully not too much studtching), “Aromatic Stone Eject Bad Mattels” and the dreaded “Open Superintending Raphe Treatment.” Superintending is the last thing I needed at the moment, so I probe no further into what that extra “h” might stand for.
This is actually my second stop of the last evening, for Beijing friends tried to escort me to an even more elaborate place, where foot reflexology came with a show of dancing girls and jugglers, ping-pong and a buffet at no extra charge. But I was spared all that, thanks to Olympic regulations that every place where a foreigner might even accidentally fall asleep requires passports my friends didn’t have with them. (I suppose certain massages do constitute a crossing of borders of sorts.) In the end, I am happy to settle for the standardized Chinese processing that these days amounts to putting oneself through a human car wash. Eager male attendants hover too close for comfort at every point, removing and replacing underpants for you if you don’t stop them, grunting and shouting in military manner to those who will receive you down the line, giving you a preliminary rubdown with a cloth that feels more like a Brillo scouring pad, next to a cold room where an even colder mistress administers a pressing all-points massage whose main point is to make victims scream in agony, then onto a soft armchair equipped with personal TV and headphones, to sip tea or watermelon juice along with a roomful of other cadavers in “recovery,” and finally back downstairs for a variety of tubs and saunas as thoroughly and unbearably overheated as the Guangdong province economy. Healthful, it’s promised. Relaxing, it’s not.
I’m still trying to get over a last day of fandom in pouring rain — which had turned my final trip to an Olympic venue into as big a disaster as the first. Even at 9 a.m., it seems that half of Beijing has jammed into the subway station at the Olympic Green. I’m elbowed at least 10 times. Stuck on stairs that climb toward an exit, though I don’t see why everyone is in such a hurry, for all that waits is an hour trapped in lines through security barriers that leave me soaked to the bones (I have no umbrella because they are not allowed inside the various sites and the plastic poncho provided has torn in six places) before reentering the very same station we all had to exit. Even after the train, it’s a good 15-minute hoof to the National Stadium, or “Bird’s Nest” (maybe it really was designed for those who can fly) and the only food for miles in any direction is provided by sponsoring McDonald’s. (Never in my life have I been so grateful to see an Egg McMuffin.) And all this to catch a couple of decathlon heats at great distance, and see some javelin throwers skittering across a wet track that barefoot volunteers try to sop up with wet rags. (Is this really the Olympics?) Later, wishing to witness the last of many pratfalls for U.S. athletes at these games, in this case the loss of the once-invincible women’s softball team to some of the most muscular Japanese I’ve ever seen, the rain delays the game so long that I can catch but a few innings.
What’s the difference? By now, I have accepted this Olympics “with Chinese characteristics,” in which venues have been built on a massive scale for great show, and not for the convenience of those poor souls who actually dare to get in and out. Here, only the grand design counts, and the rest of us are mere cogs. Isn’t that the lesson of a long history anyway, so why not learn it, and learn it well, right from the beginning? And this is not merely the whining of one critical young man turned grouchy middle-aged man. Nor is it some sort of “racism,” a charge that would sure have surprised my first wife (a Beijing native), to point out that not enough post-event buses were provided (whether driven by an individual whose color is brown, white, yellow or blue). Nearly every foreigner to whom I speak — while squeezed into a subway car — shares the same set of complaints. But being a spoilsport at the world’s biggest sporting event doesn’t get you much traction.
In the end, I’ll just rate these games from one to 10, compared with the others I’ve attended. Beijing gets a nine in pomp, spectacle and mind-blowing architecture. But it scores only a three in bringing people together and furthering world understanding, with heavy-handed security taking precedence over proper spaces and activities for friendly interaction. And in terms of transport, organization and the fan experience, I’d award only a two — and I only give it that much because of the tens of thousands of volunteers straining for free to put a kind face on China. In human terms, my best Olympic moment came on one staggeringly hot afternoon when a family of peasants, country origins plainly indicated by their weather-beaten faces and dust-covered suits, each with a heavy, sleeping baby slung over their shoulder, refused to grab a taxi in front of me, insisting over and over that the foreigner’s pampering should take precedence over their daily struggle.
Maybe I was too preoccupied getting from place to place, but it doesn’t seem that these games yielded much in great athletic drama, either. China marched to predicted dominance, while Jamaican sprinters further sped a U.S. retreat from the top rung (one small development on the march to a more equal world). The biggest surprise to me is that, given the protests along the worldwide torch run, not one athlete lifted a fist, sported a symbolic headband or even tattoo, to show support for Tibet. Nor, as far as we know, did a single ticket holder rise to reveal an antigovernment slogan on a T-shirt, something that would have been awfully easy to do. Caution — some might call it cowardice — was the watchword of the day.
As for the rabid nationalism of Chinese fans, perhaps that, too, could be forgiven, as it was by my old acquaintance Ai Weiwei, artistic originator of the “Bird’s Nest,” with whom I finally got a spare minute on my last day. “It’s like this is a first date with the world and of course on a first date you are going to be very, very nervous,” observed this once-fierce opponent of the Chinese regime. “In the dark, with the lights out, you might be able to do it as good as anybody. But that first date can be really scary.”
Does that mean we will soon have to go through this all over again? And what will China be like the next time it makes such a bid? “Waiting for the Olympics to come, waiting for the Olympics to go,” was apparently a common new proverb around China, referring to the agonies of dealing with such a momentous, yet artificial landmark. Like most of the pundits now pouring out their “post-Olympics” postscripts, like the Chinese organizers themselves, I too believe these games were just the starting point in China’s joining the club of so-called developed nations. Now they will face the real challenges of achieving such status: becoming less dependent on exports in a world headed toward recession, strengthening their internal markets and civil society, and dealing with their internal colonials (Tibetans and Xinjiang Muslims) in a more fair manner after a period of brutal repression that has probably engendered more potential terrorists than ever before.
When it comes to human rights, it also seems unlikely that all the prisons doors will suddenly swing open, and some, like dissident writer Ma Jian, predict the crackdown will only worsen when foreigners turn their gaze elsewhere. Still, the government could also use its newly gained self-assuredness to loosen the reins somewhat. Chinese history is replete with sudden, sweeping rebellions and surely one will come someday, though it seems unlikely to start among the youth of this Olympic generation, who seem as blindly apolitical as their counterparts in the West. Probably, China is headed toward the paternalist, one-party “guided democracy” practiced in that model of tranquil prosperity, Singapore. But I would place my money on the U.S. ping-pong team before I’d bet on any of the above.
Like many who have been watching China for a long time, I’ve led a schizophrenic existence: defending China’s achievements, innovations and steady rise to those who never saw the place as it was before, but challenging every Chinese I meet in the country to practice more truly independent thoughts and actions. (For instance, even those young people who consider themselves enlightened Internet users invariably describe the Dalai Lama as a devil with two heads and six horns.) Maybe I’m a hard-ass, but having witnessed the fear and petty thuggery foisted on so many by China’s Gong An, or Public Security Bureau, I will use this extra-governmental apparatus as my litmus test. It won’t be tall skyscrapers or grand sporting events that prove to me China is a modern nation. It will be the disappearance of the Gong An, and its accountability for past crimes (like those of similar ilk in Argentina, South Africa, etc.).
At least, in the minds of many Chinese, like one Western-educated computer scientist I met on a subway ride, these Olympics have redressed certain perceived past wrongs, made up, in his words, for “the humiliation of the Opium Wars.” Did this professor really believe that anyone in America today had even heard of the Opium Wars? In every Chinese paper, the Olympics were referred to as the fulfillment of a “hundred-year” dream. Yet how did that square with the legend promulgated by Olympic Web sites that Ci Xi, the empress dowager who ruled China, had no idea what the “Olympics” might be when approached back in 1896, and offered to send palace eunuchs to be China’s “runners”? Maybe it’s more than mere coincidence that the Olympics should be the one artifact of ancient Western culture embraced by a society so proud of its own antiquity. Come to think of it, the current-day Olympic movement makes a perfect match for the Chinese government. It’s a top-down hierarchy, bound by strict rules, in which old men profit from the strong bodies of the young, all in the name of some vaguely humanist, quasi-socialist goals.
Leaving Beijing, I decided to try the new direct train line to the airport. It was quick, if crowded, and seemed to follow the old arcaded trail of straight, white-barked trees that had once so charmed me. But whoever planned the train station had failed to provide any escalators, or trolleys, or porters, so that everyone had to drag their luggage down three flights of stairs. This got me to thinking that all China was really like one of those Olympic relay races. One portion of the society was straining to pass the baton smoothly onto the next portion, but the various racing parts still weren’t in sync. One area was sprinting too fast, another was still far too slow, one held the baton proudly aloft, while others dropped it, uninterested or unaware of where the finish line lay. That was what made it all so frustrating, and so fascinating.
When I got to the airport, I discovered that yet another typhoon had struck Hong Kong, leaving hundreds stranded and waiting in line for two beleaguered airline representatives to reschedule all of them. (At times like this in China, the so-called responsible parties are never to be found.) Experienced at the system, I bypassed the line and went straight into full heartless harassment mode until I’d gotten a seat on a nonstop back to my Bangkok home. Waiting for my flight, I also witnessed dozens of tearful goodbyes, as athletes and their parents or siblings set off in different directions — proving the Olympics were still in the end about young people, perhaps too young for all the pressure. And later that sunny afternoon, I was treated to the first clear view below that I’d ever had in hundreds of takeoffs and landings. I could chart the full immensity of Beijing’s new sprawl, I could spot bits of the Great Wall snaking through the bare Western Hills, and I could follow a deep brown line of pollution, like a stubborn bathtub ring, extending along the horizon for 500 miles. If only China were that easy to see.
What I couldn’t write in China
Relative press freedom hasn't led to rampant muckraking, but it's not all smiles and "Have a great day!" beyond Olympic Beijing.
Forget about ping-pong. China’s national sport is reading between the lines. For decades, even centuries, official pronouncements and state-dictated reports have been carefully scanned for the implications of some critical omission, the leader whose name got left out, yesterday’s slogan suddenly discarded.
For me as well, finishing up my Olympic coverage and another challenging stint in China, it seems that what I couldn’t find, didn’t see, was kept from hearing or reporting, looms larger than all the spectacle scalped tickets could buy.
This wasn’t for lack of effort — which took me out past the new Olympic city to the end of the new northern subway extension. Guided by an adventurous photographer from Philly recently settled in Beijing, I came to see a large enclave of unofficial “recyclers,” perhaps a thousand or two former farmhands, all from nearby Henan province, who now saw better opportunity in picking, sorting and cleaning the capital’s plastic bottles, cardboard, cotton rags, obsolete computers and other less palatable detritus. Trash was definitely a Chinese growth industry.
And many were raising their children in concrete block huts set in the midst of the stink and waste. This was a China far from cheery Olympic banners urging citizenry to create “green and cultural zones” or to “start up a new trend — pay attention to civilization!”
Still, aside from growling guard dogs, no one blocked our unwelcome attention. One tenant trash sorter even explained how barriers to transport out of the city during the Olympics had killed his usual income of $20 a month. Other men, playing pool in place of working, would only say they were enjoying their two-week “holiday.”
Unlike numerous past trips, when I had been followed by vans of Public Security Bureau spies, or escorted everywhere as required by government minders from bogus “host” organizations — in early years to block scrutiny of sensitive issues but later merely to scrounge expensive meals off the rich foreigner — this time I was free of obvious impediments.
Restrictions for journalists had been loosened step by step in recent years, and flung aside altogether, at least temporarily, as China strained to show the world its “open” response to the Sichuan earthquake. Now, aside from having to register with local police if I wasn’t in a hotel, I could presumably have traveled beyond Beijing to anywhere in the country (excluding Tibet).
Some had predicted, in the run-up to the Olympics, that such free access would lead to a deluge of negative stories as muckraking foreign journalists ran amok. So what happened to those stories? Where the chilling exposés of human-rights outrages or peasants disgruntled over irrigation water diverted to feed Beijing’s splashing stadium fountains?
Maybe there is a Nixonian “silent majority” out there who feel these games are a giant waste of human resources and state treasure. As is so often the case, dissent came through to me solely in the form of whispered jokes. The five fuwa, cutesy Olympic mascots based on ancient Chinese elements, were being called the “five disasters” — in reference to all that had befallen the country in the past year. The “Bird’s Nest” stadium was mocked as “impermanent” and “easily crushed,” like real nests in nature. And the impressive procession of opening fireworks meant to symbolize “footsteps” in the air were said to be stepping on the people instead.
According to more grapevine humor, those angriest at China’s leaders were the many prostitutes kicked out of town just when a huge harvest of horny young Westerners were there for the picking!
But I couldn’t report much on the large number of Muslims from Xinjiang province who once populated Beijing. Their larger neighborhoods have been bulldozed away, while many were recently sent home or had simply left. Even Niujie (Cow Street), a popular tourist area around Beijing’s largest mosque, has been eaten away by office towers.
There was no point in interviewing the docile, skullcapped Uighur waiters in the lamb restaurants in the area, as cowed as the street name.
And I can’t tell you much on meeting a Tibetan businessman — who was being subjected to harsh questioning every time he traveled, even as he planned, like most other Tibetans, to skip town altogether during the games.
I did get to meet Ma Jian, a famed dissident author normally living in exile in London, but mainly because Ma dared to defy orders given him when he entered the country to refrain from public appearances and “anti-Olympic” activity.
Viewing the Chinese body politic as near death since the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 — a metaphor advanced brilliantly in his new novel, “Beijing Coma” — the writer urgently wanted to spread his view of the Olympics as a planned campaign to crush dissent akin to the Cultural Revolution. That seemed a bit extreme, but it was certainly true that I couldn’t write about the dozens of other activists and authors already jailed, especially Hu Jia, the meek and mild Web site host who was imprisoned, though ill and with a pregnant wife, for “crimes” such as being an advocate for AIDS sufferers.
And I didn’t bother to see for myself the three parks designated as “political protest” areas during the games when other reporters informed me that every Chinese person they followed, including a lawyer advocating workers’ rights and two elderly women in a long-running dispute over evictions by rich developers, had been hauled off and imprisoned as soon as they dared apply for a protest permit.
For most Olympic guests, any such grumpy notes are drowned out by tens of thousands of enthusiastic young volunteers trained to say, “Have a great day!” and “See you again!” Even the out-of-work massage girls perched in barber chairs around the city cheer for favorite sporting idols like attractive diver Guo Jingjing.
China’s mass media has finally mastered the machinery of celebrity mythmaking. And it has also figured out the most modern means of efficient repression. Better than muzzling those with dangerous thoughts is creating a populace so focused on personal goals and consumerism that they have nothing to say in the first place. For this strategy, who can blame them? They are merely learning from us.
Sweet swift deities in spikes
My day of track and field was glorious, but I long to turn the Olympics back to the purity of my boyhood dreams.
Tuesday, Day 11 of the official count, I finally made it to the real Olympics. It started the moment I walked out on the second half of a handball match, fed up with cheering sections of potbellied Norwegians and Hungarian men going ape over some girls in shorts repeatedly flinging a small ball toward one another’s throats. This wasn’t what the gods on Mount Olympus had intended, nor anything like the pursuits of laurel-crowned heroes etched on Greek vases that had first got me hooked as a kid (having left me with the erroneous impression that even modern competitors went about running and jumping in the nude).
Fed up with the miscellany of bizarre contests that stray tickets had handed me, I headed straight over to the by-now booming scalper market, conducted openly and with official blessing outside the main subway transfer point to the Olympic complex. I wasn’t looking forward to cutthroat haggling, but I had to get back to the roots of my fandom — and, with just a few hours left before the evening athletic session, I found pricing dropping rapidly into my range.
An upper-tier ticket in hand — fingers crossed that the electronic scanners would pronounce it real — I had just time enough to walk six long blocks to the first local restaurant within the vast, vapid zone of sterile new construction surrounding the National Stadium. In a giddy mood, I overordered as usual: hand-shredded mutton with chilies and leeks, home-style tofu, half-moon leek cakes and numbing Sichuan hot eel strips over vermicelli. If ever there were an Olympics of cuisine, China would dominate even more than it was doing already: At this tatty, humble dive, the menu (with lurid color photos to point at) ran to 36 pages and everything from pumpkin to frog.
A full moon was coming up over the Olympic Green, by evening properly populated with ticket holders. Banks of giant TVs were set into rows of new skyscrapers beyond the iridescent humming of the “ice cube” aquatic center. Up close, the latticed “bird’s nest” itself was worthy of hours of gawking, if somewhat marred by the lurid color scheme of its lighting and stairways. Inside, it seemed more like just another half-domed stadium, and, given its illusion of openness, was so devoid of cross-breeze ventilation that every Chinese lady in the crowd fanned herself through the multiple heats and medal ceremonies.
Aside from their primal beauty, the main advantage of the track and field events were that they really did draw everyone in the world, to both the events and the stands. There was no way for one nation to dominate through noise or accomplishments, not even the Chinese on this night.
And what a night of drama for my $90 investment: the stocky Estonian so elated at winning the discus throw with one extraordinary heave that he did a full 100-meter dash as celebration, jiggling all the way; the last-second stumble of Lolo Jones and her agonized clutching at her hair as she remained on the track, not wanting to leave; likewise, the exhortations of Briton high jumper Germaine Mason to get the crowd to rhythmically clap him toward an unexpected silver medal; a devoutly hooded girl from Bahrain looking like Batgirl as she even more unexpectedly led her heat; a 1,500 meters without favorites, won once more by a Bahrain entrant; watching runners Jeremy Wariner, Usain Bolt and Dayron Robles win their heats without even getting out of breath.
It was even a day when the security volunteers went out of their way to shout, “Have a great time!”; when English-speaking Beijingers helped lead the subway exodus where signs were missing; and a family of farmers from the countryside, holding several sleeping babes on their shoulders in the hot sun, kept insisting that I take the first taxi ahead of them. On this day, even I wanted to believe that the Olympic ideal was indeed untattered, the flame eternal rather than powered by methane and the heat of jingoistic blather.
Even so, between anthems and agonies, I sketched out a plan to save the Olympic movement from itself and move back to the purity of my boyhood visions, if not the Greeks themselves. Some of these ideas have been floated in some form or another already, but in any case, here’s my immodest proposal.
First, save huge costs, the planet and political tussling by rotating the Olympics among perfectible, permanent sites on each continent. (For instance, winter in Norway, Canada, Japan, Russia, Chile; summer in Sydney, Barcelona, Los Angeles, Nairobi.) So that too many events aren’t crammed together, causing spectators at home or at the games from missing most of the action, reduce the main body of the Olympics to its traditional core sports: athletics, gymnastics, wrestling, weightlifting, swimming. Precede these with an “entertainment” Olympics, more of an exhibition, in which too silly or too professional sports are eliminated and more common ones like squash, golf and bowling are added.
To reduce nationalism, have all flags banned from stadiums — countries can host celebrations in educational national pavilions afterward. All participants should wear Olympic uniforms, devoid of national symbols, and be crowned in laurels, not heavy metal medals. The official count of winners by country would also be eliminated. And while it would be impossible now to return to the days of strict amateurism, with its smug hypocrisy, Olympians would be made to agree not to accept any commercial endorsements or profits for at least two years from their performance.
Finally, the fat bureaucracy of the IOC and all its perks would be eliminated in favor of elected governing bodies for individual sports. And above all, the largess of corporate sponsors could be used to make the games entirely free of admission charges — with the large proceeds from world television rights donated to worthy charitable causes. In other words, a nonprofit Olympics with no behind-the-scene games.
Sound too utopian? Too “bleeding heart”? Until then, I guess, the best that we’ve got is track and field and a bunch of sweet swift deities in spikes.
Dare to struggle, dare to win!
Nike darling Liu Xiang let down his nation. Shouldn't the poster boy for the new China have crawled across the finish line -- no matter what?
Playing with pain is a slogan in America. But in China, it’s a way of life. Nothing is a greater badge of honor in this culture of top-down masochism than bearing the unbearable and carrying out the unreasonable and unthinkable — whether in legend or in the burdens of daily life.
Traditionally, though less so these days, masters pass down their wisdoms and craft (from Peking opera to Peking duck) through a time-honored process of initiation in which apprentices are expected to put up with insults and beatings. It’s worse than hazing in a frat house, where the watchword since Maoist days has been “Dare to struggle, dare to win!”
That’s why the biggest fuss of the Olympics thus far here was hurdler Liu Xiang’s failure to compete in Monday’s 110-meter heat. Among the deluge of gold medals and collective exultation, his was scripted to be the most golden moment. Since winning the first track gold ever for China in Athens, Liu has by far been China’s most recognizable celebrity. Forget the ping-pongers and pimply gymnasts. Those are a dime a dozen. Liu, with his mop of hair and mottled good looks, was not just quick but cocky, less a patriot than a perfect icon, the first Chinese to really look just right in Nikes.
He had already parlayed his status into millions of yuan, as the spokesman for just about every Chinese product, and was slated to not just earn zillions more but a place in some eternal pantheon by winning his ultimate race before his own people.
Never mind that a young Cuban had already beaten him this year and that Liu was already having problems with a pesky tendon. The hundreds of volunteers at the Olympic press center, people all over China, stopped dead Monday morning to watch Liu. When he started grimacing, even overgrimacing, it seems, to lay the groundwork for his case for quitting, they hardly took note. He tested the injury in one false start, grabbing his ankle in pain, then tore off his numbered bib in disgust, walking off the track almost nonchalantly toward the lockers. But everyone stood still and waited. The public couldn’t accept what it was seeing.
All day, Chinese TV replayed the story of Liu’s life, interviews with his parents, past race victories. They also showed his coach breaking down in tears hundreds of times over. On Web sites, some accused him of being a coward, a quitter, betraying the fatherland. Even if he crawled on his hands and knees, he should have crossed the finish line. Perhaps, in a certain sense, the same cool modernity that had made Liu a symbol for the new China was exactly what it now couldn’t accept.
He had listened to the best advice, he had cared about his own health over medals, and he had done the rational, realistic thing in a country that loves to get swept up in the irrational.
Given all this, it was actually a relief to retreat into a hospitality center for the American team’s families and friends, sponsored with great fanfare and frequent branding displays by Bank of America. Set near a far more exclusive and snobby USA House run for official IOC functions, the bank had also commandeered one of Beijing’s larger and more modern multistory restaurants, around a peaceful artificial pond on the grounds of the Workers’ Stadium — ironically, the scene of many mass rallies against the “running dogs of American imperialism” back in the 1970s, when this was the one passable sports facility in town.
In a city too spread out for central meeting grounds and too beset with security barriers, many Olympians were using the bank’s largess. In a brief time, I met top volleyballers, softballers, even just-defeated sprinter Lauren Williams and her smart, sassy schoolteacher mom (who, under her breath, admitted that she’d already seen enough of what she felt was a very unexotic and unfun East). Beyond the many TV screens, all the comforts of home were here, from Internet access to the salad bar that one media rep told me was the hardest reach for local cooks.
And here, in what felt instantly to me like some Midwest main street or Southern California mall, the talk wasn’t about medal counts or national honor, but best friends from high school and trips to the Great Wall. Aside from Michael Phelps, the U.S. has had a tough ride here — with plenty of spills, injuries and upsets. But I didn’t sense any resentment around the pitchers of Thousand Island dressing.
After a lifetime of rooting against my own country, of faithfully identifying with underdogs like Cuba, Thailand or Ethiopia (was there anyone at these games who could approach distance-runner Kenenisa Bikele in sheer ease of greatness?), I couldn’t help feeling that years of being the top dog didn’t just inculcate arrogance, but also a certain amount of class, the humility and good manners that come with having already been at the top, already won enough to see that winning isn’t always enough.
Sometimes, I had to admit, there was something admirable and tangible about that “cockeyed American optimism.” But being a reporter at these games has felt like the most futile of many futile attempts to influence the world through native acts of witness. These games will be declared a success because they must be a success, for the Chinese government, for the Chinese people and for all those planning to make millions here. What was the “One World, One Dream” in Beijing’s slogan if not the dream the world shared of cashing in on China’s boom?
Yet, as Liu Xiang’s sudden fall proves, the appeal of the Olympics is the constant threat of unscripted failure. Sports get to the common man because the line between winners and losers, glory and oblivion, is even thinner than in our lives. To paraphrase the great anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss: “Games thus appear to have a disjunctive effect. They establish inequality where there was the previous appearance of none.” And no one, not even the world’s fastest man, can outrun the principle of the Tao.
The naked city
Beijing's artists deserve a gold for the sheer wealth of their audacity and talent.
Photo by John Krich
Artwork from Beijing’s 798 art district.
A contingent of merry, mindless militants from the bad old days wave a banner. But this one isn’t red; it bears Olympic rings instead. A naked man sprawls illicitly in the tangle of construction rubble surrounding China’s gleaming new stadiums. The vaunted symbol of the National Stadium is surrounded by waltzing security guards or columns of giant, Dali-esque ants, and a runner in one photo collage wears the entry number of the Tiananmen massacre: “1989.”
Obliquely, but in more ways than anyone expected to be allowed, Beijing’s estimated 10,000 artists are responding, if not participating, in the Olympics. But, as Huang Rui, a painter credited with founding the 798 art district, commented to me earlier, “The only golds, silvers and bronzes Chinese artists receive are for the rising prices.”
On a spare afternoon between events, I headed for 798 — which, in a country obsessed with lucky numbers, is fast becoming China’s most well-known trifecta, designated by the government itself as one of the five top spots for Olympic tourists to visit. Named for a Czech-built electronics factory transformed into the compound’s central gallery space, the area in a northeastern suburb called Dashanzi began like many an “artists” village in Beijing. I remember visiting the first of these scruffy encampments on the outskirts of town, where artists worked and began informally selling in cheap space far from the eyes of officialdom. Sometimes, it was not far enough, as I myself was once witness to a sudden public security raid in which several premature rebels — one infamous artist signed his work with the name emblazoned across his white headband, “Evil Doer” — were hauled off to indeterminate incarceration.
Back in the early ’90s, I was introduced to a childhood friend of my ex-wife’s. Even then, Ai Weiwei was a striking figure with his cultivated goatee, Mandarin tunic and dour manner. He had just returned to China after years of scrounging as a sidewalk artist and “King” of the East Village — that archetypal artists village in New York. For all his underground credentials, he had taken residence in a wing of a very ample courtyard home — the legacy of being part of a former cultural elite as the son of Ai Qing, the official poet of socialist ecstasy under Mao who was later sent to clean toilets in remote Xinjiang province.
Weiwei railed against the cultureless barbarity, fearful conformity and lack of international awareness in his homeland. He tinkered with making surreal objects (shovels covered in fur, etc.) à la Marcel Duchamp and helped organize shows, catalogs and galleries to counter officially approved realism, infamously under the slogan “Fuck Off.” Later, I stayed in his big, minimalist studio compound in the open land around Beijing — a first of many architectural experiments he took on — where he also briefly sold antique furniture and amassed a collection of ancient objects that showed up in his sculptures and vase-shattering performances.
This time, he isn’t answering my phone calls. And it isn’t because he’s in trouble for his many open calls to stay away from an Olympics staged by what he has labeled a tyrannical, fascist regime. On the contrary, he has an appointments secretary to filter requests because he has become so famous — not so much for being the “godfather” of the Chinese avant-garde, with works now fetching millions in Europe, but because he is credited with inspiring the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron with creating the main Olympic Stadium as a “bird’s nest.” On the eve of the Olympic Games, he published a statement in England on why he is continuing to boycott the icon he helped forge, though he has toned down his rhetoric a good deal, conceding the Olympics are a great moment for the country but hinting that the “courage” shown by the athletes and organizers should also be aimed at combating autocracy and restrictions on free expression wherever they are found.
If the arts have gone establishment, the other main symbol is 798. I was somewhat dreading to see the place full of ugly government signage, bland group homages to sport, encroaching fashion outlets, tacky souvenir stands and trendy cafes, even the presence of “museums” sponsored by Nike and others. Indeed, all of these are there, while many of the genuine low-rent geniuses have fled from gentrification and ever-increasing police patrols. Yet even the veteran nose-thumbing Gao brothers, while complaining they can’t show their Chairman Mao outfitted with enormous breasts, had a new building and thriving rooftop cafe. Spurred by the slick, Belgian-funded Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, which aims to become the MOMA of China, many of the exhibits seemed better mounted and more wisely curated.
All in all, aside from direct reference to China’s present-day leaders, or troubling issues like Tibet or workers’ rights, everything from the authority shocking to the downright pornographic seemed to be on offer. Perhaps yesterday’s striving artists are now driving BMWs, but, as a cultural asset, 798′s wealth of sheer audacity and talent amid such sophisticated modernist design would be the envy of any other city in Asia, Tokyo included.
Not only that, but newer artists seem to be moving away from the knee-jerk use of campy communist imagery and the overdone merger of pop art with Chinese mythology, and heading toward more personal and less imitative ways of responding to the enormous material handed them by China’s contradictions. China doesn’t look to dominate just gold medal counts to come but world visual arts and photography as well.
How is it that Chinese young people seemed to “get” modern art, even performance and installation works, right from the start? And how to explain why Beijing has always been a center of ferment and enormous free personal space amid regimentation?
Maybe it’s the yin of the yang, the opposite signs of the coin. But after my day at 798, I enjoy my first all-nighter, hopping from a party on a marble boat within an imperial park to a “bed” bar outfitted with antique platforms in the open air of a decrepit hutong courtyard to drunken strolling down the dark, silent and urine-soaked alleys of a tile-roofed China where all that counts, all that has ever counted, is how cleverly people can transcend their downtrodden state and declare their humanity to hidden no-name bars behind heavy doors where students shoot pool and shoot the shit until dawn.
As though to put a pointillist point on my day at 798, my taxi back to the hotel at 5 a.m. passes a young Chinese man standing in the midst of a major Beijing thoroughfare, completely buck naked but for the platform heels borrowed from his girlfriend.
So far, he gets my Olympic gold.
The bluest day
Sun shines bright on Beijing at last -- a perfect day for pure sport, beckoning all to party (and spend) within the Forbidden City.
Photo by John Krich
A week into the Olympics, and China finally got its first official “blue day” — of many more promised, including the dubious target of 250 a year. Never mind conflicting readings of particulate matter in the air. Forget the competition over whose skies are clearer, parks greener, young volunteers cheerier. The “heavens are smiling on this great nation,” as director Zhang Yimou declared after a rainless Opening Ceremony. The sun is breaking out all over town, the better to see the gleam in Beijing’s daring collection of glassed-over architecture, the better to see the shine in China’s gold medals.
All is right with the world, for as long as the world lasts, and I’ve even had a stroke of Olympic luck. My random morning baseball ticket is getting me into the premiere quadrennial confrontation: Cuba versus the U.S. I can feel the buzz, and hear the rumba beat of Cuban fans, as soon as I get out of the subway a half-mile from the temporary ballpark whose grandstands rise above jungles of scaffolding. Less attended, but taking place simultaneously on a second diamond, is a ballgame with more potential import, though far less dancing in the stands. That’s the fledgling nine from China taking on their more baseball-savvy Taiwanese brethren. Some fans even try to watch both games at once from the top rows in right field. And China’s novices will battle to a win in 12 innings.
Back in March, I had come to this same field to witness the first U.S. Major League exhibitions in China, between the Padres and the messianic Dodgers — accompanied by much hoopla and hand wringing at how late our national pastime has been in following the lead of the NBA. (Basketball is clearly China’s No. 1 sporting love, with football and golf rising to challenge, and the Olympic match between Yao Ming and U.S. superstars like the beloved “Ke-bi” — Chinese for Kobe Bryant — was one event the hoop-enthralled locals didn’t mind losing.) Far-fetched as it seems, our archaic game has already been well implanted here, through a school program with 300,000 participants, fed by nostalgia from the ’30s and a lust for anything new and foreign.
But on this day, it’s the Cubans who coach the Chinese — not so much about baseball’s ground rules as its passions. There are estimated to be only 300 Cubans in China, from embassy staff to popular hotel entertainers, and life in so regimented a place is “a very hard weight,” one singer tells me. Yet all of them seem to have shown up today, shaking their short shorts, waving their banderas, razzing the umps in their high-speed Spanish. There ought to be a law against people having so much fun in public and there probably is in China, but there’s no more way to enforce it today than there is to get the Cubans to “sit down in front,” as disgruntled Chinese urge.
What could be better than a tie game going into the 9th, between a bunch of gum-chewing American collegians and some blasé Cuban old-timers in funkily baggy pants and fittingly red uniforms that make them look like spike-wearing roosters? And all in the sunshine! The Chinese ladies don’t bask in it, because a tan is the last thing they want.
But there’s something wrong about a bleacher filled not with boos and catcalls but shade-giving umbrellas. And there’s something very wrong with the fact that this is just an exhibition in the Olympics, that the Latin stars who’ve come North (Pujols, Ramirez, Guerrero) can’t go up against their brethren and that baseball will be eliminated altogether next Olympics (I don’t agree with my fellow blogger King Kaufman on this one) — since the fossils who run MLB are more wedded to their own winter-time World Baseball Classic. Somehow, too, the charge is off this old Cold War rivalry, with Fidel on the way out and so many Cubans in Miami. It’s not so much “Yanqui No!” as “Cuba — Who Knows.” And when, after agonizing, I have to leave, it seems a perfect match of geopolitics that the game is headed into extra innings with no clear result. (The Cubans later prevail, 5-4.)
Unfortunately, I’m headed indoors to catch the last hour of a long procession of four-round flyweight boxing preliminaries. Back at the L.A. Olympics in 1984, the sport had been lent glamour by the ringside appearance of Sylvester Stallone and other on-screen pugilists. In Beijing, the venue is China’s grimiest old gym. And everything seems listless until the last fight of the day features an unknown Chinese entry. Suddenly, the stadium rungs swell with the cry of the moment: “Jia-you!” Literally, this “Go China!” means “Put in the gas.” The cries are silenced in the first 10 seconds when a stocky Kazak puts the local favorite on the canvas. This tall gawky kid doesn’t even put his gloves up to protect his face and bounces about in over-exaggeration like Chaplin’s mock fighter in “City Lights.”
But sure enough, his point totals rise inexorably toward victory, though much of his scoring comes after inconclusive clinches. It all seems quite fishy, but I figure I must not understand the technicalities. Later, I’ll read that the judging for this fight, and others involving Chinese, are creating the first serious controversy of the games, with many complaining that there seems to be a decided home-court advantage. Everywhere I go, in fact, Beijing is awash with whispers about why various tallies in China’s mounting medal count could be tainted. Smaller Asian neighbors, it’s said, have “stepped aside” to let China win in exchange for future favors.
To Dr. Alceste Maurizio Lo Buono, general secretary of the Mediterranean Weightlifting Foundation, it’s all very simple: “In Italy, we have 500 active weightlifters. In China, they have 1 million. So they can pick and choose, and they train from age 6, not 16, until they are more machines than men.” He’s telling me this to predict the ultimate triumph of a frizzy-haired Schwarzenegger named Lu Yong at my first weightlifting final. Oddly enough, I find pumping iron to be one of the most consistently compelling sports of the games: pure human will against more pure matter, and may the best behemoth win.
This time the Chinese challenger, with an utterly rabid crowd urging him on, surpasses reigning world champ Andrei Rybakou from Belarus, even overcomes a technicality when he has to redo his lift after thinking he has already won gold. And he does it, sending the crowd into a frenzy, which includes one elderly man nearly shoving me to the ground, twice, so he can get a telephoto shot. Is it really within Olympic rules for all those sweet volunteers who man the metal detectors and usher us to our seats to reappear, on cue, as cheerleaders for each section, mechanically urging total rapture from the crowds?
When the Olympic Torch when through Thailand, I had seen mobs of Chinese students threatening the few pro-Tibet protestors with unbridled, semi-violent scorn (imbued since birth, as Chinese are, to consider any supporter of the Dalai Lama as an enemy of the nation’s sovereignty). So far the nationalism in Beijing hasn’t seemed so threatening to me, except when I turn on any of the many channels of China Central Television, which focuses exclusively on China’s winners, day and night, to the exclusion of everyone else, in so single-handed an appeal to their viewership as to make NBC execs envious.
But here, at my first gold medal ceremony, with the whole crowd wailing out a national anthem they once saw little use for, I feel like a very small and weak foreigner, unable to lift the load of this new history from my back.
Maybe that’s all sour grapes from a falling superpower. Maybe it’s OK if new rivalries emerge, sporting or otherwise, to replace tired ones. And maybe all the fuss about bad air, and the purposeful underestimation of pollution by local agencies, is so much clinging to Western superiority. After all, the Organizing Committee members I interviewed on past trips have always been quick to point out that Beijing is the most “underdeveloped” place ever to get the games (Mexico City might disagree) and that sewage treatment, waste management, recycling, green cover, secondary pollution from construction, encroaching desertification were all issues that had to be addressed from scratch.
The only difference with the air is that it’s plain for everyone to see, and that the Chinese themselves promised too much in terms of controlling the vagaries of nature — trying to get away with starting the games on the auspicious 8/8 date (“eight” in Chinese sounds just like “prosperity”) when everyone knows summers here are hazy, muggy, nasty, best suited for the usual outdoor pursuits of old men playing Go on park benches and head-shaven babes wandering in traditional open-crotch pj’s.
Still, today was a perfect day for pure sport and tonight a full moon shines on Beijing, beckoning all to party (and spend) within the Forbidden City. As for world peace and Olympic fair play, the forecast is … cloudy.
Page 1 of 3 in John Krich
Jack Donaghy fears the 99 percent 
Tim and Eric’s comedy of repulsion 
Who is Newt’s sugar daddy really helping? 
“Eastbound and Down” heads to the Redneck Riviera 
David Brooks: “I have heard of Jeremy Lin” 
Come back, “Colbert Report”! 
Anthony Shadid, the best of his generation 
Billionaire Romney donor uses threats to silence critics 
Secret papers turn up heat on global-warming deniers 
The enormous mistake Mitt can never admit 
